Minds And Times

John Parrington, Mind Shift: How Culture Transformed The Human Brain (Oxford, 2021).

I will partly quote from and partly paraphrase this book, then argue that it is relevant to sf, including to works by Poul Anderson.

"...our minds, even those of identical twins, are unique because they are the result of this remarkably plastic brain, exquisitely shaped and tuned by the social and cultural environment in which we grew up and to which we continue to respond through life." (p. 16)

Parrington argues that the growth and development of each human being involves:

the biologically determined development of an organism;

"...the interaction of a growing individual with other people..." (p. 104);

the cultural impact of that interaction on that development.

A child's mind does not merely acquire values, expectations and competencies appropriate to a specific culture. Instead, the culture restructures natural mental functions into higher mental functions mediated by language. Children begin by sharing voluntary attention, logical memory, concept formation and development of will with adults or other children but then internalize these functions, thus becoming discrete individuals within human society. Mental categories are first social/"inter," then psychological/"intra." This transforms mental contents by changing brain structures.

Here are three scenarios familiar in sf, including in works by Poul Anderson:

a modern man time travels to a future civilization and is alienated from it;

a time dilated space traveller returns to Earth and is alienated like the time traveller;

a third character is simply born in a future civilization.

No doubt the third character might be alienated from his civilization but the nature of his alienation from the culture that has shaped his brain and mind cannot be simply identical with that of either of the first two characters whose brains and minds were shaped by entirely different - "alien" - cultures. Do not regard the person born in a future civilization as if he were interchangeable with an individual to whom that civilization is new and strange or even incomprehensible.

I go further and ask: if the future society is a high tech civilization where nanotech provides for all physical needs and where resources are deployed solely to realize the potential of each individual, then why should anyone born and brought up in such a civilization be alienated from it? That sounds like a contradiction. I call this idea a pro-active utopia. "Utopia" has come to imply a passive, dead-end, deteriorating dystopia.

In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, we become familiar with the idea that, a few generations after a major historical alteration - no World War I etc -, the entire world population would comprise different individuals, produced by a different course of events and by a different genetic mix, e.g., if all the young men killed in the trenches had lived into old age etc. However, Parrington's book shows us that, even in an alternative timeline where every individual was genetically identical with an individual in our timeline (with you, me, the next person and so on), those individuals could be very different persons living in a very different society.